I regret to inform you that a team of researchers, writing in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed paper published on bioRxiv, tested the running speed of 258 spider species and found one that’s significantly faster than the average human. I know, terrifying.
The winner is the jungle huntsman spider, aka Heteropoda jugulans, a species fittingly native to Queensland, Australia. It clocked an astonishing top speed of 3.59 meters per second, or just over 8 miles per hour. Considering that the average human jogs in the 5 to 6 MPH range, that’s a bit terrifying.
Thankfully, it’s non-aggressive and mostly uses its speed to hunt for delicious insects.
The researchers gathered live specimens from around the world to participate in a kind of Olympic sprint race for spiders, in the process creating the largest comparison of spider sprinting speed ever. The spiders were encouraged to run across a gridded surface as cameras tracked their movements.
Some species were more than willing to race across the track, while others needed a little encouragement in the form of gentle prodding with a paintbrush. Tarantulas were the laziest of the bunch, needing a blast of compressed air to get them moving.
Australia’s Jungle Huntsman Spider Is Now the Fastest Spider in the World
The study wasn’t just about crowning a spider speed champion. The researchers wanted to better understand what actually makes a spider move quickly. For instance, they found that bigger spiders generally run faster, likely because they have longer legs that allow them to stride more efficiently.
Overall, spiders with longer legs were faster than those with skinny legs. Ground-hunting spiders always outperformed web-building spiders. While size generally correlated with speed, the researchers were shocked to find that the very tiny, recently discovered orange goblin spider was a little speed demon, skittering at over 20 centimeters per second despite weighing only 0.1 milligrams.
The jungle huntsman spider now sits alone atop the throne, having been freshly crowned the world’s fastest spider, according to science. It dethroned the Moroccan flic-flac spider, which doesn’t even technically run as much as it kind of tumbles like an old west tumbleweed. It’s quite disturbing, and if one were tumbling toward me, I would quickly improvise a flamethrower to kill it.
But it’s not technically running, so it doesn’t count for this study.